I have received several requests to post a quick note when there is a new release (16-Nov-2014) of the McuOnEclipse components on SourceForge (see “McuOnEclipse Releases on SourceForge“). I have published today a new release, and with following major improvements:
McuOnEclipse SourceForge
For me as an Eclipse and Processor Expert lover, a press release that Atollic supports Processor Expert catched my eye :-). So there is yet another way to use Processor Expert: with a commercial Eclipse IDE provided by Atollic (atollic.com/).
Atollic Splash Screen
Time to check it out…
In my earlier post I used a hacked together shield for building a clock based on Adafruit’s NeoPixel/WS2812 (“LED Clock with Kitchen Hot Pan Protector“). The new design supports now 8 parallel data streams, integrated realtime clock and wireless connectivity with the nRF24L01+ module.
NeoPixel Shield for FRDM Boards
I happily used the Keil v4.71.2.0 μVision tools for a few small projects (see “Using Keil µVision (ARM-MDK) with Processor Expert Driver Suite“) with the ‘lite’ edition (32kByte code size limitation). This weekend I wanted to move to the new v5.12.05 version.
Keil uVision5
And there were indeed several things which are different. So this is post is about getting this version getting up and running as the v4.7 one.
Processor Expert components have an interesting concept: Events. Events are shown in green color with the ‘E’ (for Event):
TimerInt Component with Events
Freescale had announced at FTF back in April this year that they will use Kinetis Design Studio and the Kinetis SDK for all new Kinetis devices. The switch from CodeWarrior to Kinetis Design Studio (see “Comparing CodeWarrior with Kinetis Design Studio“) was not much of big deal for my projects (although CodeWarrior still has better features), and projects are rather easily portable. However, the move to the Kinetis SDK has been massively disruptive: Before it was easy to move projects from one device to another with Processor Expert, even from S08 to ColdFire to Kinetis. Now with the Kinetis SDK everything is very different. At least Freescale now officially supports FreeRTOS, and for myself as a big fan of that open source RTOS, that was some good news.
Blinking Red LED with FreeRTOS Task using Kinetis SDK, FreeRTOS and Processor Expert
So in this tutorial I’m showing how FreeRTOS can be used with the Kinetis Design Studio. That makes at least using the Kinetis SDK bit more familiar to me :-).
The cool thing with Processor Expert is that it gives me guidance through the settings. And there is a nice (rather hidden feature) which proposes me values I can enter:
💡 First, switch to the non-Tabs (classic) view, as the classic view is using the screen real estate better, and shows you *all* the information needed, and does not hide some.
So if you have some values to correct because other settings have changed:
Values to Enter
When I create a new Processor Expert project for a board I already have the components configured, then an easy way to transfer components from one project to another is to copy-paste the components. In the ‘source’ project I select the components I want to use, choose Copy (or CTRL+C shortcut on Windows):
Copy of Processor Expert Components
Unlike CodeWarrior, the Kinetis Design Studio (at least in V1.1.1) does not offer a choice between C and C++ projects. That makes sense with the GNU ARM Eclipse plugins, other than the CodeWarrior gcc integration, there is no need for setting up a special tool chain for C++ (see “Compiling C Files with GNU ARM G++“). While this is great, things are not perfect yet, so I’m providing in this post the information needed to properly setup a C++ project with Kinetis Design Studio V1.1.1.
Debug View of Startup Code Calling C++ Constructors
Sometimes I think that a problem should be solvable in a few minutes, and then it turns out that it lingers around for months. Very, very frustrating! Such a thing is getting the USB 4.1.1 stack running on the FRDM-K64F board. I have that board since April 2014, and it took me 7 months to get the FSL USB stack running on it :-(.
FRDM-K64F Board
MCU on Eclipse 